Throughout all industrial, commercial and educational environments, there is a need to provide content, which may include news and information regarding the workplace, to a group of people such as a workforce.
One important example is the provision of content for the training of a workforce. As, for example, private sector companies, federal, state, and local governments work to improve their organizations, there arises a need to provide training content to members of the workforce to develop the workforce. The sheer number of training courses available, for example, from in-house, university and private sector providers, can mean that it is difficult to select the most appropriate course or courses for a member of the workforce.
Providing inappropriate content is wasteful since there is always a cost incurred by studying training content such as a course module, either in time or external expenditure. It would be beneficial if computer systems existed to prevent the provision of inappropriate training content.
Currently there exist computer systems that try to predict the most appropriate training content, wherein a computer-implemented filter processes input data provided by the user and outputs, to the user, information based on the input data provided by the user. In some existing systems, the computer-implemented filter tries to provide most-useful content to the user, based on the input data provided by the user. However, it can be difficult to determine what content is most appropriate.
Some systems use a needs-assessment—consisting of a set of questions relating to individual training requirements—to tailor content pertinent to each user. This can take the form of a paper-based survey completed prior to studying provided information, or an online survey. One such example is the system provided by the Corporate Coach Group (Corporate Coach Training Ltd of Gloucestershire, UK) in which a “training needs analysis” questionnaire is completed by a trainee to determine strengths and weaknesses; see https://corporatecoachgroup.com/courses/training-needs-analysis.
Other systems select course modules to present to the user based on their previous use of the training material. For instance, if a user performs well in a test at the end of a topic, they might be presented with more stretching training material on the next topic. If they perform less well in the test, they might be presented with more basic material on the same topic. An example of this sort of ‘adaptive’ approach to training is marketed by Knewton, Inc of New York, USA; see http://www.knewton.com.